When Arthur is just hours old, his mother dies.
When Arthur is five, his father drops him off for his first day of school. Uther doesn’t get out of the car.
When Arthur is eight, he abruptly learns he has an older half-sister, when she moves in after the death of her own mother.
(He learns that sisters are annoying.)
When Arthur is eleven, his father grounds him for a week after he gets a B for mathematics. Even from his room, he can hear Morgana shouting in the hall down below.
A week after his fourteenth birthday, Ella from polo lessons kisses him behind the stables. Arthur feels—embarrassed, sick. He asks his father if he can switch to rugby on Tuesday afternoons instead.
When Arthur is fifteen, Morgana storms out and doesn’t return. The house feels like a tomb.
When Arthur is eighteen, a gangly, wild-haired mental case tackles him on his first day at Oxford and calls him a knob.
(He turns out to be Arthur’s roommate.)
When Arthur is nineteen, he goes home with Merlin for Christmas, and is embraced affectionately by a mother for the first time. Throat tight, he excuses himself to the bathroom.
(There are baby photos of Merlin all over the walls. It makes him realise there are no photographs in his father’s house.)
When Arthur is twenty, Morgana says to him, voice uncharacteristically serious, that he can tell her anything. She looks at him knowingly. But he doesn’t want to know it himself.
When Arthur is twenty-one, and drunk, he almost kisses Merlin. He asks Sophia out the next day.
(It lasts eight months. He wakes up unable to breathe properly, almost every night. It’s a relief to walk in and find her cheating with Kay.)
When Arthur is twenty-four, sober and heartsick, Merlin tackles him again, demanding to know what’s wrong, why Arthur’s been avoiding him. He tries to tell Merlin it’s nothing, can’t get the words out. Merlin calls him a knob—again—and kisses him.
(Arthur can breathe.)
When Arthur is twenty-eight, he asks Hunith for her blessing, and she cries and tells him he’d better ask Merlin to marry him, silly man, because she already considers him a second son.
When Arthur is twenty-nine, it’s Morgana who walks him down the aisle.
And when Arthur turns thirty, he comes home to find his family lying in wait to surprise him: Morgana, Gwaine, Hunith, Gwen and Lancelot, Gaius—and Merlin, with their little brown dog, Archie.
Family @merthurmicrofic {415 words}
